In ondermeer NRC Handelsblad beweerde opiniemaker Ian Buruma:
Donald Trump is dan wel geen Hitler, maar het blijft verontrustend om te zien hoe lankmoedig de Republikeinen meegaan met elke stap die de Amerikaanse president doet om beschaafde democratische normen met voeten te treden. Even zorgelijk is de neiging in bepaalde linkse kringen om te weigeren een wezenlijk verschil te zien tussen Trump en Hillary Clinton of Obama. De schuld van alle ellende zit hem immers in het ‘neoliberale systeem’; eigenlijk was Clinton nog erger dan Trump, die tenminste bereid is om het met Poetin op een akkoordje te gooien. Voor rechts en dit soort links geldt hetzelfde: zij weigeren de reële gevaren van het autoritaire populisme van vandaag te onderkennen.
Deze beweringen kregen als kop ‘Herkennen we de signalen voordat het te laat is?,’ waarbij de vraag is: wie zijn ‘we’? De gehele mensheid, of alleen Ian Buruma en zijn neoliberale ‘urban elites’? In de inleiding van zijn klaroenstoot wordt gesteld dat de:
meeste mensen het verval van de democratie in de jaren dertig niet [zagen]. Of dat nu kwam door gemakzucht of ideologie, laten we proberen van het verleden te leren, schrijft Ian Buruma.
Hoewel zijn oproep om ‘van het verleden te leren’ uitermate redelijk klinkt, vrees ik toch dat mijn oude vriend de lezer zand in de ogen probeert te strooien. Ik bedoel het volgende, Buruma schrijft:
Even zorgelijk is de neiging in bepaalde linkse kringen om te weigeren een wezenlijk verschil te zien tussen Trump en Hillary Clinton…
Bestaat er daadwerkelijk ‘een wezenlijk verschil’ tussen deze twee politici, en zo ja welk ‘wezenlijk verschil’? De ‘corporate press,’ onder aanvoering van The New York Times, het icoon van de zogeheten ‘vrije westerse pers,’ verwijt president Trump dag in dag uit dat hij het internationaal- en nationaal recht schendt, en suggereert tegelijkertijd dat een Democraat als de voormalige presidentskandidaat Hillary Clinton dit absoluut niet zou doen. Vandaar Buruma’s bewering over het ‘wezenlijk verschil’ tussen beiden. Laat ik een tamelijk willekeurig voorbeeld geven uit 2016. Tijdens een uitzending van DemocracyNow! stelde de kritische Amerikaanse journaliste Amy Goodman het volgende tegenover haar landgenoot Greg Grandin, hoogleraar Latijns Amerikaanse geschiedenis aan de New York University:
Let’s talk about Honduras. I want to go to Hillary Clinton in the 2009 coup in Honduras that ousted the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. In her memoir, ‘Hard Choices,’ Hillary Clinton wrote about the days following the coup. She wrote, quote: ‘In the subsequent days I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary [Patricia] Espinosa [in] Mexico. We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections [could] be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot,’ unquote.
Since the coup, Honduras has become one of the most dangerous places in the world. In 2014, the Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres spoke about Hillary Clinton’s role in the 2009 coup. This is the woman who was assassinated last week in La Esperanza, Honduras. But she spoke about Hillary Clinton’s role in the 2009 coup with the Argentine TV program Resumen Latinoamericano.
BERTA CÁCERES: [translated] We’re coming out of a coup that we can’t put behind us. We can’t reverse it. It just kept going. And after, there was the issue of the elections. The same Hillary Clinton, in her book, Hard Choices, practically said what was going to happen in Honduras. This demonstrates the meddling of North Americans in our country. The return of the president, Mel Zelaya, became a secondary issue. There were going to be elections in Honduras. And here, she, Clinton, recognized that they didn’t permit Mel Zelaya’s return to the presidency. There were going to be elections. And the international community — officials, the government, the grand majority — accepted this, even though we warned this was going to be very dangerous and that it would permit a barbarity, not only in Honduras but in the rest of the continent. And we’ve been witnesses to this.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres speaking in 2014. She was murdered last week in her home in La Esperanza in Honduras. Last year, she won the Goldman Environmental Prize. She’s a leading environmentalist in the world. Professor Grandin?
GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, and she criticizes Hillary Clinton’s book, Hard Choices, where Clinton was holding up her actions in Honduras as an example of a clear-eyed pragmatism. I mean, that book is effectively a confession. Every other country in the world or in Latin America was demanding the restitution of democracy and the return of Manuel Zelaya. It was Clinton who basically relegated that to a secondary concern and insisted on elections, which had the effect of legitimizing and routinizing the coup regime and creating the nightmare scenario that exists today.
I mean — and it’s also in her emails. The real scandal about the emails isn’t the question about process — you know, she wanted to create an off-the-books communication thing that couldn’t be FOIAed (Freedom of Information Act. svh). The real scandal about those emails are the content of the emails. She talks — the process by which she works to delegitimate Zelaya and legitimate the elections, which Cáceres, in that interview, talks about were taking place under extreme militarized conditions, fraudulent, a fig leaf of democracy, are all in the emails.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And particularly what does she say in them?
GREG GRANDIN: Well, she talks about trying to work towards a movement towards legitimating — getting other countries, pressuring other countries to accept the results of the election and give up the demand that Zelaya be returned and basically stop calling it a coup.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to March 2010. This is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveling to meet with the Honduran president, Porfirio ‘Pepe’ Lobo, whose election was boycotted by opponents of the coup that overthrew Zelaya. She urged Latin American countries to normalize ties with the coup government.
SECRETARY OF STATE HILLARY CLINTON: We think that Honduras has taken important and necessary steps that deserve the recognition and the normalization of relations. I have just sent a letter to the Congress of the United States notifying them that we will be restoring aid to Honduras. Other countries in the region say that, you know, they want to wait a while. I don’t know what they’re waiting for, but that’s their right, to wait.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton endorsing the coup. What is the trajectory of what happened then to the horror of this past week, the assassination of Berta Cáceres?
GREG GRANDIN: Well, that’s just one horror. I mean, hundreds of peasant activists and indigenous activists have been killed. Scores of gay rights activists have been killed. I mean, it’s just — it’s just a nightmare in Honduras. I mean, there’s ways in which the coup regime basically threw up Honduras to transnational pillage. And Berta Cáceres, in that interview, says what was installed after the coup was something like a permanent counterinsurgency on behalf of transnational capital. And that was — that wouldn’t have been possible if it were not for Hillary Clinton’s normalization of that election, or legitimacy.
Dit is slechts één voorbeeld van Buruma's 'beschaafde democratische normen,' die de grondslag vormen van de Amerikaanse imperialistische politiek, gepland en gesanctioneerd door Democraten en Republikeinen. Natuurlijk weet ook Ian Buruma dit, maar als propagandist van de zogeheten ‘liberals’ die al vanaf president Bill Clinton het neoliberale beleid uitvoeren dan wel steunen, moet mijn oude vriend voortdurend de schijn hooghouden dat er sprake is van ‘een wezenlijk verschil’ tussen ‘Trump en Hillary Clinton,’ en dat daarom ‘de neiging in bepaalde linkse kringen om te weigeren een wezenlijk verschil te zien tussen Trump en Hillary Clinton,’ daarom zo ‘zorgelijk is.’ Vanzelfsprekend is merken zowel de binnenlandse als buitenlandse slachtoffers van het meedogenloze neoliberale beleid van de elite in Washington en op Wall Street tot nu toe nagenoeg niets van ‘een wezenlijk verschil’ tussen Republikeinen en Democraten. Integendeel zelfs, het televisienetwerk CNBC berichtte op 19 juli 2018 dat onder de ‘eerste zwarte president,’ de Democraat Barack Obama:
In 2015, the top 1 percent of families in the United States made more than 25 times what families in the bottom 99 percent did, according to a paper from the Economic Policy Institute.
This trend, which has picked up post Great Recession, is a reversal of what was seen during and after the Great Depression, where the gap between rich and poor narrowed.
‘Rising inequality affects virtually every part of the country, not just large urban areas or financial centers,’ said co-author Estelle Sommeiller.
Als minister van Buitenlandse Zaken was Hillary Clinton bovendien verantwoordelijk voor de chaos die na de NAVO-bombardementen in Libië en het vermoorden van kolonel Khadaffi is gecreëerd. Verrukt lachend liet Hillary Clinton de wereldpers weten: ‘we came, we saw, he died, ha, ha, ha.’ Hoewel het allereerst Libische vrouwen zijn geweest die de dupe werden van de ‘feministische’ politiek van mevrouw Clinton, waren zij niet de enigen. Bekend is dat:
Gaddafi used Libya’s oil wealth for the benefit of the Libyan people.
He lived in a tent, a nice tent, but not in a palace, and he did not have collections of European exotic cars or any of the other paraphernalia associated with the ruling families in Saudi Arabia and the oil emirates that are Washington’s Middle Eastern allies.
In Libya, education, medical treatment, and electricity were free. Gasoline was practically free, selling for 14 US cents per liter. Women who gave birth were supported with cash grants and couples received cash grants upon marriage. Libya’s state bank provided loans without interest and provided free startup capital to farmers.
Gaddafi’s independence from Washington is what brought him down. Earlier in life Gaddafi’s goal was to organize Arabs as a bloc that could withstand Western depredations. Frustrated, he turned to Pan-Africanism and refused to join the US Africa Command. He wanted to introduce a gold-based African currency that would free Africans from American financial hegemony.
Gaddafi had Chinese energy companies developing Libya’s energy resources. Washington, already upset with Russian presence in the Mediterranean, was now faced with Chinese presence as well. Washington concluded that Gaddafi was playing ball with the wrong people and that he had to go.
Washington organized mercenaries, termed them ‘rebels’ as in Syria, and sicced (afsturen. svh) them on Libya. When it became clear that Gaddafi’s forces would prevail, Washington tricked naive and gullible Russian and Chinese governments and secured a UN no-fly zone over Libya to be enforced by NATO. The express purpose of the no-fly zone was to prevent Gaddafi from attacking civilian targets, which he was not doing. The real reason was to prevent a sovereign state from using its own air space so that the Libyan Air Force could not support the troops on the ground. Once the gullible Russians and Chinese failed to veto the Security Council’s action, the US and NATO themselves violated the resolution by using Western air power to attack Gaddafi’s forces, thus throwing the conflict to the CIA-organized mercenaries. Gaddafi was captured and brutally murdered. Ever since, Libya, formerly a prosperous and successful society, has been in chaos, which is where the Obama regime wanted it.
All sorts of lies were told about Gaddafi and Libya, just as lies were told about Saddam Hussein and are told today about Syria and Russia. A British Parliamentary Report concluded unambigiously that the Western peoples were fed lies by their governments in order to gain acceptance for the destruction of Libya, and that Libya was destroyed because Gaddafi was regarded as an obstacle to Western hegemony.
Note that none of the presstitutes have asked the killer bitch about her guilt under the Nuremburg laws for this war crime prepared on her watch. Note that the oligarchs who own the killer bitch and their press prostitutes intend to make this war criminal the next president of the United States.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y
In Syrië wilde Hillary Clinton een nog desastreuzere politiek van verdeel en heers voeren, aangezien zij een gewapend conflict met de Russische Federatie voorstond, die — was zij tot president gekozen — de dreiging van een Derde Wereldoorlog snel dichterbij had gebracht. In The Impeachment of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton: for High Crimes in Syria and Libya (2016) pleiten de auteurs dan ook voor ‘the impeachment of Obama and Hillary for starting or joining two illegal and extremely destructive wars that have the world on the edge of disaster.’
Maar omdat de westerse ‘corporate press’ dermate gecorrumpeerd is geraakt, kan een mainstream-opiniemaker als Buruma onweersproken beweren dat ‘bepaalde linkse kringen… weigeren een wezenlijk verschil te zien tussen Trump en Hillary Clinton,’ en ‘zij’ zodoende ‘weigeren de reële gevaren van het autoritaire populisme van vandaag te onderkennen.’ Al doende beticht mijn oude vriend Ian deze ‘linkse kringen’ de weg vrij te maken voor een nieuw fascisme, daarbij volledig voorbijgaand aan het fascisme van het totalitaire neoliberale kapitalisme.
1 opmerking:
Ian Buruma is beslist geen Menno ter Braak.
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